The ACLU's Tobacco Addiction.

• Author: Mintz, Morton
• Position: American Civil Liberties Union receives donations from tobacco industry - Abstract

Nadine Strossen, president of the American Civil Liberties Union, sent me an "invitation" to join recently. "For seventy-eight years, the ACLU, supported exclusively by caring, concerned people like you, has been the nation's staunch defender of the Bill of Rights and freedom," she wrote. Sadly, however, her description of who "exclusively" funds the ACLU is a falsity, which her underlining compounds. Unless, of course, tobacco companies are "caring, concerned people."

In 1987, the ACLU's executive director, Ira Glasser, began to solicit Philip Morris for annual grants without first consulting his board of directors, he admitted to me in an October 1992 interview. By that time, the leading cigarette manufacturer had given the tax-exempt ACLU Foundation $500,000. Second-ranking R.J. Reynolds also contributed, but Glasser refused to tell me how much.

How Strossen could not have known of the ACLU's financial dependence on tobacco is hard to imagine. She was sitting beside Glasser and me when he revealed the Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds grants. In July 1993, moreover, leading news organizations--including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Reuters--publicized the grants in stories based on a report I'd done, "Allies: The ACLU and the Tobacco Industry." Yet the ACLU still maintains the fiction that Strossen knew nothing of the contributions. "Nadine ... is not involved with the accounting procedures of the ACLU," membership liaison Rita Buland wrote on September 25 to an inquiring ACLU member, Stanley E. Cohen.

The envelope containing Strossen's solicitation to me bore the return address of her board of directors. It was they, she wrote, who had "asked me to extend this invitation." Many of the directors are outstanding lawyers. Had they actually vetted a text implicitly characterizing the two biggest cigarette manufacturers as "caring, concerned people"? And would a law professor--which Strossen is--not distinguish flesh-and-blood persons from paper corporate persons? Some time ago, I asked Strossen about the ACLU's tobacco subsidies. She didn't respond. That was predictable, since she'd ignored my previous queries, handing them off to Glasser.

While the 1993 news stories emphasized Philip Morris's grants, "Allies" made other revelations. One was that the ACLU had never told its membership-not in its quarterly newsletter, not in fundraising letters--of its continuing solicitation and acceptance of tobacco money. Nor had it revealed...